date de création

extrait du livre "inside MSSQLSERVER2000" de Kalen Delaney :
(si c'est bien ce que tu veux)

SQL Server: The Early Years
In 1986, Microsoft was a mere $197-million-per-year business with 1153
employees. (Ten years later, Microsoft had revenues of nearly $6 billion and
almost 18,000 employees.) Microsoft's products were entirely desktop focused,
and the main bread-and-butter product was MS-DOS. Client/server computing was
not yet in the vernacular of Microsoft or the computer industry. Data management
on PCs was in its infancy. Most people who kept data on their PCs used the
wildly popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application to keep lists (although many
were discovering the limitations of doing so). Ashton-Tate's dBASE products
(dBASE II and the recently released dBASE III) had also become popular. Although
a few other products existed, such as MicroRim's Rbase and a relatively new
product from Ansa Software called Paradox, Ashton-Tate was clearly king of the
PC data products. In 1986, Microsoft had no database management products.
(Beginning in 1992, Microsoft would go on to achieve tremendous success in the
desktop database market with Microsoft Access and Microsoft FoxPro.)

IBM's Database Manager wasn't in the same category as products such as dBASE,
Paradox, and Rbase. Database Manager was built to be a full-featured database
(with atomic transactions and a full SQL query processor), more similar to
traditional minicomputer-oriented or mainframe-oriented systems such as IBM's
DB/2, or Oracle, or Informix. Microsoft needed a database management system
(DBMS) product of the same caliber, and it needed one soon.

Microsoft turned to Sybase, Inc., an upstart in the DBMS market. Sybase hadn't
yet shipped the first commercial version of its DataServer product (which it
would do in May 1987 for Sun workstations running UNIX). Although certainly not
a mainstream product, the prerelease version of DataServer had earned a good
reputation for delivering innovative new capabilities, such as stored procedures
and triggers, and because it had been designed for a new paradigm in computing:
client/server.

As is true in all good business exchanges, the deal between the two companies
was a win-win situation. Microsoft would get exclusive rights to the DataServer
product for OS/2 and all other Microsoft-developed operating systems. Besides
getting royalties from Microsoft, Sybase would get credibility from Microsoft's
endorsement of its technology. Even more important, Sybase would gain a
beachhead among the anticipated huge number of personal computers that would be
running the new OS/2 operating system.

Because the transaction-processing throughput of these OS/2 systems wasn't
expected to be high, Sybase could use the systems to seed the market for future
sales on the more powerful UNIX system. Microsoft would market the product in
higher volumes than Sybase could; it simply wasn't economically feasible for
Sybase's direct sales force to deliver what would essentially be the first
shrink-wrapped release of a full-fledged, blood-and-guts database to PC
customers. Higher volumes would help Sybase win more business on UNIX and VMS
platforms. On March 27, 1987, Microsoft president Jon Shirley and Sybase
cofounder and president Mark Hoffman signed the deal.

In the PC database world, Ashton-Tate's dBASE still had the reputation and the
lion's share of the market, even if dBASE and Sybase DataServer offered
extremely different capabilities. To gain acceptance, this new,
higher-capability DBMS from Microsoft (licensed from Sybase) would need to
appeal to the large dBASE community. The most direct way to do that, of course,
was to get Ashton-Tate to endorse the product-so Microsoft worked out a deal
with Ashton-Tate to do just that.

In 1988, a new product was announced with the somewhat clumsy name
Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server. Although not part of the product's title,
Sybase was prominent in the product's accompanying information. This new product
would be a port of Sybase DataServer to OS/2, marketed by both Ashton-Tate and
Microsoft. Ashton-Tate had pledged that its much-anticipated dBASE IV would also
be available in a server edition that would use the dBASE IV development tools
and language as a client to develop applications (for example, order-entry
forms) that would store the data in the new SQL Server product. This new
client/server capability promised to give dBASE new levels of power to support
more than the handful of concurrent users that could be supported by its
existing file-sharing architecture.

Ashton-Tate, Microsoft, and Sybase worked together to debut SQL Server on OS/2.
(This was the first use of the name SQL Server. Sybase later renamed its
DataServer product for UNIX and VMS Sybase SQL Server. Today, Sybase's database
server is known as Sybase Adaptive Server.)

The first beta version of Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server shipped in the fall
of 1988. Microsoft made this prerelease version available at nominal cost to
developers who wanted to get a head start on learning, developing for, or
evaluating this new product. It shipped in a bundle known as the NDK (network
development kit) that included all the necessary software components (provided
that you were developing in C) for getting a head start on building networked
client/server applications. It included prerelease versions of SQL Server,
Microsoft LAN Manager, and OS/2 1.0.





br



"matthieu" <matthieu.boillon@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
news:051501c3401c$a1f29f00$a301280a@phx.gbl...
J'aimerais connaître la date de création de SQL server
merci